if connected

Everyone knows the biggest battles in technology are today being fought by a small number of large organizations. We intuitively know who these great powers are: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and maybe Microsoft. But we’re not so clear on what it is that makes those particular companies the key protagonists rather than other equally large digital companies — Samsung, Sony, Nokia and Yahoo! among them — who appear to be sidelined.

Calling this a battle, or “The Great Tech War of 2012″, misses the point. It’s far too negative a sentiment when these companies’ main focus is on long term strategy. They are aiming to construct a future in which their products and profits will prosper.

These great digital powers are now building Digital Civilizations, rather than a series of mere products, individual platforms or even ecosystems (around a platform). They are pursuing strategies that reach far beyond the confines of existing markets. They are causing widespread market collisions as they push industries to overlap, merge or cease to exist. They are outflanking and disrupting companies that follow less ambitious corporate strategies.

These new Digital Civilizations use identity to tie numerous disparate products, many devices, multiple platforms and product portfolios together into their long term strategy. Each Civilization has hundreds of millions of active users — often with credit cards attached — far more than even the largest telecom operators or media companies. They straddle industries rather than operating within legacy market sectors. They have an organizing ideology underlying their strategy that motivates and attracts talented employees, excites partners, and is the foundation for the marketing that entices users to become their customers.

What defines these Digital Civilizations? What makes them new and different? Many organizations, companies, industry consortiums, and companies have parts of this strategy in place within their current products. But the new Digital Civilizations have all of the following characteristics:  Read the rest of this entry »

Just eight months after Nokia announced a complete reversal of their smartphone strategy, Nokia unveiled the first new phones to result: the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710. And, impressively, the Lumia 800 is already shipping and will be available for sale in six European countries in November.

On the eve of Mobile World Congress 2011 — the mobile industry’s main conference — new Nokia CEO Stephen Elop overturned Nokia’s previous smartphone strategy. Rather than building smartphones based based on in-house Symbian and MeeGo software, Nokia instead embraced Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Nokia’s future rests on the success of this decision, at least in developed countries across Europe, Asia and North America.

Alongside their initial Windows Phone handsets, Nokia today announced a new range of smarter feature phones aimed at emerging markets. This new Asha range includes more dual SIM devices, more full keyboard designs, and more touch screens. “Asha” means hope in Hindi but Nokia’s real long term hopes rest more with the new Lumia smartphones than with these evolutionary Series 40 handsets.

With Windows Phone, Nokia hopes to regain market share in the high end part of the mobile phone market because today’s high end technology and features become tomorrow’s mid market mainstream. If Nokia loses to Android and Apple in the high end, then the danger Nokia faces is that it will lose in the mainstream just a few years from now.

Early signs are that Nokia has regained credibility and is on a path to recovery with its Nokia World announcements:

• Dual SIM is now a foundation of Nokia’s emerging market strategy. Nokia was slow to offer consumers the ability to switch SIMs — essentially run more than one number on a phone with different pricing — compared with LG, Samsung and numerous small phone makers. In the second quarter of this year their phone shipments suffered dramatically: down 34% compared with the previous quarter. But the arrival of dual SIM enabled a full recovery in Q3, although admittedly with lower average price per handset. Nokia shipped just 2.6m dual SIM handsets in Q2 but 17.9m in Q3 and has launched five new dual SIM handsets since June. Across Asia, the Middle East and Africa Nokia phone unit shipments rose 32% in Q3.
• Nokia is finally executing quickly. The Lumia 800 Windows Phone is already shipping from Nokia’s factories just eight months after the major strategy change. It will be available in November. By contrast, Nokia unveiled 2010′s flagship phone, the N8, in April but failed to ship in time for Nokia World 2010 that September. Read the rest of this entry »

[Update after the event - my analysis of Nokia's just unveiled Windows Phone smartphones is here, enjoy]

Nokia is about to unveil the results of its decision to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone as its main smartphone, rather than Symbian or MeeGo. CEO Stephen Elop will be  leading the keynote at Nokia World 2011 in London.

The presentation starts at 1am San Francisco / 4am New York / 9am UK / 10am Berlin / 4pm Hong Kong / 5pm Seoul / 7pm Sydney.

Here’s the list of sites with live coverage:

• Nokia official webcast
• This is my next / The Verge: Liveblog
  (lots of great ex-Engadget folks)
• Engadget: Liveblog
• ZDNet: Liveblog

Next week Apple will announce new iPhones. There will be a backlash. There will be praise. Much of significance will be lost in the noise.

Instead, Apple’s metrics should focus rivals’ attention on the importance of multi-year strategies.

Competitors are forever seeking to emulate Apple. But too many deploy me-too tactics, rather than following a consistent and sustained long term strategy:

• HP fired its CEO under a year after appointment. There’s only time to kill things, not build them, in such a short period.
• Nokia dithered on MeeGo. In 2009, Nokia partnered with Intel on MeeGo, then killed MeeGo just a year later, to focus on Microsoft Windows Phone instead.
• Samsung’s Galaxy S of 2010 resembles the Apple’s old iPhone 3GS of 2009, not the designed-from-scratch iPhone 4 that the S actually competed against at the time the S arrived in the market.

Part of the problem is that Apple keeps its strategy to itself: New products seem to appear out of Apple’s magic hat fully-formed at high profile launch events as if they’ve been born an adult, with no incubation or nurturing period. There are rarely betas or pre-announcements months ahead of availability, unlike the perpetually beta services of others. But we know Apple takes years to create these products. The iPad’s origins pre-date the iPhone and go back to around 2004 — six years before it launched — while serious development began in 2007, again years before competitors had anything publicly available that they could copy.

By mistaking tactics for strategy Apple’s many competitors are doomed to poor results. The time needed to build products as deeply and well designed as Apple’s can’t be completed overnight. Software design takes years to do. The supplier relationships that Apple is securing are long term. The investment that Apple is placing in key component design — moving into chip design with the A4 and A5 — is not something that any company could achieve without clear multi-year strategy.

Despite the Android evangelists and Apple naysayers, Apple’s metrics are nothing short of outstanding:

Read the rest of this entry »

Switching a vast company’s strategy takes time. Stephen Elop may have announced the jump from Symbian to Windows Phone smartphones back in February, but there are numerous smaller decisions that need to be made too: how departments should be organised, who does what, which products stay, which are delayed, which are killed off. Steve Jobs followed a similar path when he returned to Apple. It’s hard work.

Today, CTO Rich Green steps down for personal reasons. We won’t know what those really are because they are, well, personal. It could be as the rumours suggest a disagreement over strategy with regard to the high end MeeGo platform, it could be the stress of implementing so many changes so fast, it could truly be a personal family matter. They do happen outside of soaps.

But whatever,  the venture that Nokia embarked on first by appointing Elop as CEO last September, and then with the Windows Phone move is now too far along to retract.

Nokia is committed. Anyone at Nokia that thinks otherwise will only increase the chance that Elop’s bold courageous plan fail, and with it Nokia, by creating delay. The last thing that Nokia, and Nokia loyalists, needs now is more delay, more talk, or yet another shift in strategy.

Nokia has to ship Windows Phone devices in volume quickly to catch-up with Samsung, HTC, Apple and even and  most worryingly for Nokia to gain competitive parity on smartphones with the recently struggling Motorola and SonyEricsson.

Today we heard about the latest additions to Apple’s product empire. Today, we saw the latest extensions of the ecosystem that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop referred to in his eloquent burning platform memo:-

“Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.”

He was right that this is more than a fight between individual products like mobile handsets.

“The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.”

But ecosystem is far too weak a word. It implies that all a company like Apple, Microsoft or Google must do is to find a fertile field with favourable weather and let their product seeds grow. If that were enough, Google would not be struggling to foster more than a handful of Android tablet apps, and Apple wouldn’t be sitting on over 90,000 iPad-optimised apps. The difference in app quantity and quality would be much narrower.

Today at WWDC we see how the Apple ecosystem is run. It has a leader, a philosophy, a business model, a model of customer identity. All of these things are critical for success. Switching back to the fertile field metaphor: Apple adds a lot more to the ecosystem than simply choosing suitable environmental conditions for software and hardware to prosper. And, those extra ingredients are why Elop is wrong, or at least not sufficiently visionary in his memo. This is a far greater clash than one between ecosystems. More later when the fuss over WWDC has died down a little.

This post was originally published on my Forrester blog.

Today Intel and Nokia merged their existing smartphone and mobile device operating systems (Moblin and Maemo respectively). I’ll be brief as I’m at the MWC event right now (see my tweets for latest analysis). The target devices range from smartphones — or mobile computers in Nokia’s current positioning — netbooks, tablets, in-car entertainment among others.

This is a bold play that places MeeGo into a competitive position with Android, iPhone OS, Google’s Chrome and even desktop software like Ubuntu (as well as the mushrooming moble-centric smartphone software like Palm’s WebOS, Samsung bada and Windows Phone).

Intel’s support will raise the ability of the new platform to attract device makers as well as the app developers that every smartphone and smart mobile platform desperately needs to be competitive.

They have lots in common: Both are Linux-based; both predominantly target mobile devices; both aim to deliver outstanding rich consumer Internet experiences; and both have been more talk than action to date. Nokia needs to shift step quickly from talking to walking and even better running or the high end market in Europe will be dominated by the same players as in North America and Nokia will have to pursue a winback strategy. It’s taken Nokia nearly five years since the first Maemo device shipped to launch the first phone, the N900, and that is not the complete product — as Nokia concede — impressive although it nevertheless is (read my first take on the N900 in this Forrester report).

The aims for this new initiative are lofty but execution must match these ideals with both quality and speed. MeeGo must not allow the desire to implement this software on a very wide range of devices — in-car entertainments; smartphones; netbooks; tablets etc. etc. — to distract them from gaining rapid traction in the mobile market.

Meanwhile, I fear the consortium has challenges with its positioning and naming strategy: MeeGo is an awkward name. Nokia is focused on bucking the market and insisting these devices are “mobile computers” — not smartphones — and is shifting its smartphone devices to go head to head with featurephones. I understand the reasoning. But to regain the mindshare that Nokia and MeeGo needs, names as well as positioning need to be perfect.

More thoughts later when the MWC dust has settled.